For the attention of “Cindy,” the Mossad agent who seduced the atomic spy, Mordechai Vanunu: a new Halachic study has established that it is a mitzvah to have sex with a terrorist for operational purposes. The new study establishes guidelines on this issue. For example, if the agent is a married woman, “it would be best for her husband to divorce her before, and after the act he will be entitled to take her back.”
The title of the study is “Illicit Sex for the Sake of National Security,” and it appears in the new edition of Tehumin, an annual publication of Halachic studies on issues that pertain to the interface between religion and modernity — Kashrut, the army, the economy and so forth. The periodical is published by the Tzomet Institute in the Etzion Bloc, and which is identified with the Religious Zionist movement. The article was written by Rabbi Ari Shvat, a teacher of Jewish studies. Rabbi Shvat published in this case a guidebook, so to speak, for the woman Mossad agent who serves as a seductress and is forced to sleep with dangerous terrorists either in order to obtain vital information or to bring about their capture. This is known in professional jargon as setting a “honey trap,” and it was used in the Vanunu case as well as, according to foreign reports, in the assassination of the terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last January.

Rabbi Shvat addressed in his study past instances of Jewish seductresses, such as Queen Esther (who slept with Ahasueras, the king of Persia, in order to help the Jews) and Yael, the wife of Hever, (who tradition suggests slept with the enemy chief of staff, Sisra, in order to tire him and to cut off his head). It turns out that a fierce debate raged in the Gemara about such significant questions. The conclusion drawn by the Gemara was that if having sex with a gentile is crucial for advancing an important national purpose, it is even to be considered a mitzvah to do so.

“Of course, one ought to prefer an unmarried agent for a honey trap mission,” wrote Rabbi Shvat, “but if it is necessary to use a married woman it would be best… were her husband to divorce her with a get, and after the act he would be entitled to bring her back.” In order to help the couple avoid the discomfiture of having to go to the rabbinate each time, Rabbi Shvat has authorized the couple to be divorced in writing so that the matter does not become public. If the couple doesn’t have an opportunity to divorce prior to his wife leaving on the mission, her husband is obliged to divorce her after the fact since, according to Halacha, she betrayed him, even if it was for the sake of an important national mission.

Any woman who is thinking about applying for the job needs to take into account that she won’t be able to marry a Cohen, but the author of the study seems to realize that that isn’t what is going prevent women from enlisting into the Mossad ranks or, as the article put it: “Naturally, a job of that sort could be given to a woman who in any event is licentious in her ways.”

In conclusion, Rabbi Shvat wrote: “Not only is it permissible but the sages raise that action of devotion to the top of the pyramid of Halachic priorities as the most important mitzvah of all.”

The director of Tzomet and the chief editor of Tehumin, Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, praised the new study as daring and important. “Despite the fact that women employees of the Mossad are probably not going to come consult with a rabbi, it is an important connection that requires courage to make.”

Here is the transcript of what David Brooks, conservative pundit, and Shields, a liberal commentator and journalist, said on PBS News Hour:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Thirty seconds left. The firing of Juan Williams, the analyst, by National Public Radio: the meaning of it and what is the fallout going to be?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, Juan Williams is a former colleague of mine on the Washington Post editorial page and a friend for 30 years. And I think that NPR made a serious mistake. He is an analyst. And he wasn’t a correspondent. And I think they did it in a terrible way, by telephone call, without a personal chance to explain himself. And, you know, I think it has given the right wing a tremendous opening to attack NPR, which I hate to see happen, because I think it is a valuable public institution.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I work at NPR somewhat. And I’m friends with Juan. I’m friends with the people who fired him.

But I think they did it in a bad way. I agree with Mark. I think what he said was perfectly within the bounds of debate. And the damaging thing to me is, NPR has really worked hard over the past 10, 20 years to become a straight-down-the-middle network. I’m not sure they always were decades ago. But now they really are.

And now, because of this unfortunate episode, they begin to get some ideological baggage again. And that is damaging.

Apparently, NPR has now realized that Americans will not stand for its one-sided coverage of news.

There is a red line which one cannot cross without some backlash. Firing Juan Williams for saying what he thought, on another station, brought them to their knees.

Juan was asked what he thought and he gave his opinion.

His statement was very simple.

He said that he feels uncomfortable when he sees women clothed in Muslim garb, designed to prevent anyone from seeing them. That is his opinion. He worked at NPR to provide his personal commentary.

He also mentioned that he sees a relationship between jihad, mentioned only in the Koran as an Islamic precept, and Islam.

Nothing noteworthy here.

NPR’s response was to fire him.

When it was called on this their president, Vivian Schiller, said that maybe the matter had been poorly handled. She then remarked, that Williams should keep his beliefs to meetings with ” his psychiatrist.”

And they are calling Williams unbalanced?

The Washington Post, was one of thousands of newspapers around the country to detail the backlash.

NPR was shocked at the backlash. Here is what their ombudsman wrote on her blog:

Thursday was a day like none I’ve experienced since coming to NPR in October 2007. Office phone lines rang non-stop like an alarm bell with no off button. We’ve received more than 8,000 emails, a record with nothing a close second.

At noon, the deluge of email crashed NPR’s “Contact Us” form on the web site.

The overwhelming majority are angry, furious, outraged. They want NPR to hire him back immediately. If NPR doesn’t, they want all public funding of public radio to stop. They promise to never donate again. They are as mad as hell, and want everyone to know it. It was daunting to answer the phone and hear so much unrestrained anger.

Even NPR’s own staff expressed exasperation at the decision during a meeting Friday with NPR’s president, Vivian Schiller. Several of those who attended said Schiller told employees that she regretted how she handled the episode.

Staffers said that at the Friday meeting, Schiller apologized again for telling an audience in Atlanta on Thursday that Williams should have kept his comments about Muslims between “himself and his psychiatrist.”

Maybe she should be the one to get fired?

“There wasn’t anger” among NPR employees at the meeting, “but I did get a sense of despair and disappointment,” said one NPR journalist, who asked not to be named because employees are not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. “I got the impression that [management] felt they had acted rashly and without deliberation. When [Schiller] made the psychiatrist crack, it just made matters much, much worse.”

Williams commented: “I’ve always thought the right wing were ones that were inflexible and intolerant and now I’m coming to realize that the orthodoxy at NPR, its representing the left.”

Coming just before a national election which looks as though NPR will suffer at the polls, indirectly, the entire affair just hammered home how irrelevant NPR is becoming in American life.

It is the radio equivalent of The Daily Worker, the Communist paper, totally out of synch with the American psyche.

An NPR spokeswoman, Dana Davis Rehm, said there will be a review but it won’t second-guess the decision itself, but would focus on how it was carried out. NPR president,Schiller,declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Congress will consider whether to suspend funding for all public broadcasting.

Several Republicans have mentioned that the timing of the firing of Williams is the perfect gift for even more anti-NPR voting at the polls.

A large GOP win will be seen as evidence that the American people refuse to pay NPR’s propaganda bills.

We call on all of our readers to contact your congressperson and your local affiliate radio stations that carry NPR.

Let them know that you will not allow your money to be spent on such propaganda especially in a time of national economic distress.

The affiliates are especially vulnerable.

They are NPR’s local voice.

Cut the connection by leaning on your local affiliate.

Organize meet ups, make sure local listeners tell the stations, no more NPR.

Let them know why you will not donate.

Let them know that when renewal time comes with the FCC, you will complain that they are abusing their non-profit status.

The public airwaves are strictly licensed. If you complain, as I have against WAMU-FM, Washington, DC, for carrying NPR and abusing its public broadcasting status, then you will hit NPR where it really is vulnerable.

Contact the Federal Communications Commission. Complain against your local NPR affiliate. Let the affiliate know that you have done so.

NPR fired Juan Williams, one of its senior news analysts, after he made comments opposing jihad and linking it with Muslims on the Fox News Channel.

NPR said in a statement that it gave Mr. Williams notice of his termination on 20 October.

The move came after Mr. Williams, who is also a Fox News political analyst, appeared on the “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday. On the show, the host, Bill O’Reilly, asked him to respond to the notion that the United States was facing a “Muslim dilemma.” Mr. O’Reilly said, “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”

Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O’Reilly.

He continued: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.

NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

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NPR, which claims to be a non-profit, unaligned network in the public interest, regularly features Islamic-oriented newscasts, opinion pieces and dysinformation broadcasts. It masquerades as objective. However, it’s objectivity does not extend to Islam and the enemies of Israel or the West.

It delights in broadcasting the suffering of the Palestinians while remaining silent or condemnatory on Jews. Ironically, many of its top broadcasters are self-hating Jews.

It daily mentions its “sponsors” in detail while denying it does advertising. It is consistently on the left when it comes to its opinions.

NPR does not deserve your support. Let your local non-profit stations know your opinions. WAMU in Washington, DC is conducting its regular fund-raising drive. Deny them the money they seek as long as they broadcast NPR.

We call on our readers to separate NPR from its affiliate stations.

If necessary, shut down the affiliates. Turn them into other stations that are no longer broadcasting propaganda.

The following is an op-ed which Israel’s Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, published in the NY Times. Because of its importance, we are reprinting it in its entirety.

NEARLY 63 years after the United Nations recognized the right of the Jewish people to independence in their homeland — and more than 62 years since Israel’s creation — the Palestinians are still denying the Jewish nature of the state. “Israel can name itself whatever it wants,” said the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, while, according to the newspaper Haaretz, his chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said that the Palestinian Authority will never recognize Israel as the Jewish state. Back in 1948, opposition to the legitimacy of a Jewish state ignited a war. Today it threatens peace.

Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erekat were responding to the call by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, enabling his government to consider extending the moratorium on West Bank construction. “Such a step by the Palestinian Authority would be a confidence-building measure,” Mr. Netanyahu explained, noting that Israel was not demanding recognition as a prerequisite for direct talks. It would “open a new horizon of hope as well as trust among broad parts of the Israeli public.”

Why should it matter whether the Palestinians or any other people recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people? Indeed, Israel never sought similar acknowledgment in its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Some analysts have suggested that Mr. Netanyahu is merely making a tactical demand that will block any chance for the peace they claim he does not really want.

Affirmation of Israel’s Jewishness, however, is the very foundation of peace, its DNA. Just as Israel recognizes the existence of a Palestinian people with an inalienable right to self-determination in its homeland, so, too, must the Palestinians accede to the Jewish people’s 3,000-year connection toour homeland and our right to sovereignty there. This mutual acceptance is essential if both peoples are to live side by side in two states in genuine and lasting peace.

So why won’t the Palestinians reciprocate? After all, the Jewish right to statehood is a tenet of international law. The Balfour Declaration of 1917called for the creation of “a national home for the Jewish people” in the land then known as Palestine and, in 1922, the League of Nations cited the “historical connection of the Jewish people” to that country as “the grounds for reconstituting their national home.” In 1947, the United Nations authorized the establishment of “an independent Jewish state,” and recently, while addressing the General Assembly, President Obama proclaimed Israel as “the historic homeland of the Jewish people.” Why, then, can’t the Palestinians simply say “Israel is the Jewish state”?

The reason, perhaps, is that so much of Palestinian identity as a people has coalesced around denying that same status to Jews. “I will not allow it to be written of me that I have … confirmed the existence of the so-called Temple beneath the Mount,” Yasir Arafat told President Bill Clinton in 2000.

For Palestinians, recognizing Israel as a Jewish state also means accepting that the millions of them residing in Arab countries would be resettled within a future Palestinian state and not within Israel, which their numbers would transform into a Palestinian state in all but name. Reconciling with the Jewish state means that the two-state solution is not a two-stage solution leading, as many Palestinians hope, to Israel’s dissolution.

Which is precisely why Israelis seek the basic reassurance that the Palestinian Authority is ready to accept our state — to accept us. Israelis need to know that further concessions would not render us more vulnerable to terrorism and susceptible to unending demands. Though recognition of Israel as the Jewish state would not shield us from further assaults or pressure, it would prove that the Palestinians are serious about peace.

The core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the refusal to recognize Jews as a people, indigenous to the region and endowed with the right to self-government. Criticism of Israeli policies often serves to obscure this fact, and peace continues to elude us. By urging the Palestinians to recognize us as their permanent and legitimate neighbors, Prime Minister Netanyahu is pointing the way out of the current impasse: he is identifying the only path to co-existence.